My sister’s husband has a ps3 super slim that will turn on and seems like it boots up, but doesn’t show video on either hdmi or composite, even after holding the button to reset the video settings. Ive tried booting up without a harddrive just to see if it could be that causing an issue, because it should still show a no harddrive screen at that point but still nothing. No bent pins or anything around the hdmi or composition connector that I can see.
He says before it went out he would be playing and it looked like the world was crashing. The screen flashing and weird picture, which sounded like gpu artifacts to me. I reflowed the GPU just to try and see if that would temporarily fix it but still nothing.
Would the next step be just to reball the gpu or replace it and see if that works? I know it’s probably not even worth fixing because of cost and effort but I just want to try getting it working for fun, and practice with repairing/diagnosing issues. At the very least I wanted to be able to get it working long enough for him to backup any files he has, even though he said there wasn’t anything important to him on it and has already got a replacement console.
Yeah, it definitely sounds like the gpu is dead. The reason reflowing didn’t work is because solder never has been the issue on these consoles, it’s a fault in the chip itself. To have it properly repaired you would need to buy a new gpu for it, but considering how expensive services are to have it replaced, you would be better off buying a new console for that price. As for getting the save files, without the console working or if you made a backup of the EID root key when it was still working, there isn’t anything you can really do
Ya thats pretty much what I figured. I couldn’t find much on ps3 no video issues besides the simple reset video settings fix, so the gpu reflow was just a “try it and see what happens” kind of fix, even if it only lasted long enough to backup any saves. Since it is pretty much dead already, if I find a gpu cheap somewhere I’ll probably attempt to replace it myself, as much of a pain as it may be without a proper reball station. Could be fun too, who knows.
It would be near, if not completely impossible to replace the gpu without the proper tools. Years ago I attempted to replace a ps3s gpu with just a heat gun, and the motherboard was damaged far beyond any sort of repair.
I fixed my friend ps3 super slim by going into safe mode and rebooting to the menu by rebooting in the safe mode menu then keep it in 480p or composite mode then change it back in system settings hope it helps 
